Automation & Controls Engineer - CA (ub0004)

About Charm

Our mission is to return the atmosphere to 280 ppm CO₂. We convert excess inedible biomass into carbon-rich bio-oil and inject it into underground storage for permanent carbon removal. At scale we can use bio-oil to make fossil-free iron.

Our carbon removal pathway took off in 2020 with initial purchases from customers like Stripe, Shopify & Microsoft. Since then we’ve scaled to thousands of tons of carbon removal, over a hundred employees, and now have three locations in San Francisco, Colorado, and Kansas. Come join us in 2024 as we aim to become one of the first companies to put 10,000 tons of carbon back underground!

We're looking to expand our team of ambitious creative and hands-on forward-thinking humans. We value psychological safety and collaboration. We take calculated risks and don't sweep mistakes under the rug; instead, we pin them to the wall and learn from them. We value that everyone’s unique backgrounds and perspectives shape their work. We encourage you to read our company values.

Come help us reverse climate change. Gigatons or bust!

About the Role As a Senior Controls and Automation Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in designing and implementing automation vital to supporting thousands of pyrolyzers as we scale-up. You will be building automation that enables our novel electromechanical equipment to put more carbon underground as effectively as possible!  If you love understanding new processes, building automation from the ground up to perfect those processes, and working alongside a cross-functional group of highly motivated engineers, this role is for you.  We expect you to not only write fully functional code, but we expect you to co-create automation solutions to achieve our climate goals. This position will be hands-on with hardware but will also involve software development under our GitHub codebase using common industrial automation languages. You will learn about our operations and R&D equipment alike in order to develop, implement, test, and support novel control systems.  You will determine the way our operators interact with the equipment through HMI design, gathering feedback and pain points and turning those into design changes.  You’ll eagerly look at all manual processes of our operations team as opportunities for better automation systems, and work to implement those to enable our mission. This role reports to the Pyrotronics Lead under the engineering team! Join us and play a critical part in hitting our goal of gigatons of carbon removal and prevention of catastrophic climate effects!

Your Responsibilities

• As a senior engineer, you’ll play a critical role in supporting our ability to manage fleets of pyrolyzers!
• Work closely with our development team to make software updates in support of new sensors and automation
• You’ll conceptualize, implement, and validate automation software solutions, which reduce operator burden and accelerate our ability to scale effectively
• You’ll own the design of intuitive Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) tailored for frontline operators
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to pinpoint critical processes that inform the optimal user interface
• Your work will shape the foundation of our controls & data acquisition infrastructure!
• 12-25% travel to our office in Ft. Lupton, CO.

You Bring

• 4+ years experience programming PLCs and HMIs in a similar industry
• A strong understanding of protocols such as Modbus, E/IP, RS485 and OPC-UA
• A history of designing & building HMI user interfaces
• Practical experience using SCADA systems to bring-up industrial machines
• Experience designing and deploying PLC software adhering to IEC61131-3 Standard
• Programming skills in Structured Text (ST), Function Block Diagram (FBD), Ladder Logic (LD) and Python
• Strong leadership skills for taking on fast-paced projects, amongst changing requirements & priorities
• Demonstrated experience incorporating safety elements in PLC design

Bonus if you Bring

• Experience programming in Codesys
• Experience with electrical design & schematics
• Familiarity with Linux environment & SaaS tools
• Prior experience with Ignition SCADA, especially within the Vision Module